safety

At Reveal, Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter investigate an increasing criminal justice trend in which defendants are sent to rehab, instead of prison. On its face, the idea is a good one, especially for people struggling with addiction. However, the reporters find that many so-called rehab centers are little more than labor camps funneling unpaid workers into private industry. The story focused on one particular center, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery (CAAIR) in Oklahoma. Started by chicken company executives, CAAIR’s court-ordered residents work full-time at Simmons Foods…
Guns are the third leading cause of injury-related death in the country. Every year, nearly 12,000 gun homicides happen in the U.S., and for every person killed, two more are injured. Whether Congress will do anything about this violence is a whole other (depressing) article. But there is evidence that change is possible. Last year, a study published in Epidemiologic Reviews “systematically” reviewed studies examining the links between gun laws and gun-related homicides, suicides and unintentional injuries and deaths. Researchers eventually gathered evidence from 130 studies in 10 countries,…
President Trump’s nominee to head the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) appeared today before a Senate committee for a confirmation hearing. David Zatezalo answered questions about the epidemic of black lung cases, an increase in mine worker fatalities, the need for safety assistance for small mine operators, and more. Zatezalo began his career in 1974 as a UMWA coal miner and most recently served as chairman of Rhino Resources. I watched the webcast of Zatezalo's confirmation hearing. The nominee noted his experience managing 39 different coal mines in the U.S.…
At the Toronto Star, reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh went undercover as a temp worker at Fiera Foods, an industrial bakery, to investigate why temp workers are more likely to get hurt on the job. Earlier this year, Canadian occupational health and safety officials brought charges against the company, whose clients include Dunkin’ Donuts, Costco and Walmart, for the death of 23-year-old Amina Diaby, who was strangled to death after her hijab got caught in a machine. Mojtehedzadeh, along with Brendan Kennedy, write: I get about five minutes of training in a factory packed with industrial equipment…
It’s been nearly a month since Hurricane Harvey made landfall on August 25 off the Gulf coast of Texas. The Houston Chronicle continues its excellent coverage of the massive “clean-up” efforts in cities across the region. Today’s edition features photos and interviews from Dickinson, TX, a town about 30 miles southeast of Houston. More than 7,000 homes in Dickinson were either destroyed or damaged. Officials are telling “weary residents” it’s going to take some time to get all of the debris removed that they’ve placed outside of their houses, apartments, mobile homes. Jessica Martinez and…
Starting in July 2015, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) was authorized to hire several dozen more field compliance officers to protect the state’s 19 million workers. Because Cal/OSHA’s hiring has not filled all new positions or kept up with retirements, there has been an average of 34 vacancies of these fully-funded positions since then, resulting in $11 million in unused resources through August 2017. Not only is this a missed worker protection opportunity, no one knows what’s happened to these funds and where they are. Another mystery is the whereabouts…
At the Huffington Post, Dave Jamieson reports that labor unions are stepping up to help protect increasingly vulnerable immigrant workers from deportation. In fact, Jamieson writes that in many instances, labor unions have become “de facto immigrants rights groups,” educating workers on their rights and teaching immigrants how to best handle encounters with immigration officials. Jamieson’s story begins: Yahaira Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March. Vivares, who fled Colombia and…
Typically, we like to end the annual “The Year in U.S. Occupational Health & Safety” on an uplifting note. But this time around — to be honest — that was a hard sell. Take a quick look through the 2017 yearbook and you’ll quickly glean that worker health and safety is very much at risk under the new administration and from lawmakers in the states. From the attempted rollback of a new federal beryllium exposure standard to state efforts to weaken workers’ compensation systems, the view from 2017 does not seem terribly promising. On the other hand, the fight for workers’ rights has never…
Massive “clean-up” projects are underway in Houston and the surrounding region. As the waters brought by Hurricane Harvey recede, individuals seeking work---day laborers---will be assembling in damaged neighborhoods and offering their skills. It was a commonplace scene following Superstorm Sandy's destruction in 2012, and in Harvey’s disaster zone, day laborers are already on street corners and in parking lots offering to work. I hope the workers’ experiences from Superstorm Sandy are lessons being reviewed by officials, leaders, and funders in Houston. It would be time well spent if they…
At the Tampa Bay Times, Neil Bedi, Jonathan Capriel, Anastasia Dawson and Kathleen McGrory investigate a June 29 incident at Tampa Electric in which molten ash — commonly referred to as “slag” — escaped from a boiler and poured downed on workers below. Five workers died. A similar incident occurred at Tampa Electric two decades earlier. If the company had followed the guidelines it devised after that 1997 incident, the five men who died in June would still be alive, the newspaper reported. In particular, the five deaths could have been avoided if the boiler had been turned off before workers…
At PBS Newhour, Aubrey Aden-Buie reports on the shipbuilders that receive billions in federal contracts despite histories of serious safety lapses. In a review of federal contracts, Aden-Buie and colleagues found that since 2008, the federal government has awarded more than $100 billion to companies with records of safety incidents that injured and killed workers. In a transcript of the broadcast (which you can also watch at the link above), Aden-Buie interviews Martin Osborn, a welder at shipbuilder Austal USA in Alabama: MARTIN OSBORN: I was up in a boom lift, as we call it, or a man lift,…
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay describes the Tour de France as part bike race and part soap opera. The 198 riders who start the 23-day event are phenomenal athletes. Many will complete the race but not until they peddle 2,200 miles across farm land, past historic monasteries, through charming villages, and up (and down) the Pyrenees and Alps. In my cyclist-rich area of central Texas, many conversations this month are colored with comments about “The Tour.” This year, as every year, some of the riders are involved in horrible crashes. Those who have to abandon the Tour often suffer broken…
At the Center for Public Integrity, a five-part investigative series on safety at the nation’s nuclear facilities finds that workers can and do suffer serious injuries, yet the Department of Energy typically imposes only minimal fines for safety incidents and companies get to keep a majority of their profits, which does little to improve working conditions. Reporters estimated that the number of safety incidents has tripled since 2013. For example, in 2009, the chair of a safety committee at Idaho National Laboratory told high-ranking managers that damaged plutonium plates could put workers…
The first six months of the Trump administration has been particularly deadly for coal miners. Nine workers at U.S. coal mines have been fatally injured in the first six months of 2017. Five of the nine deaths occurred in West Virginia. In all of 2016, eight workers were killed on the job at U.S. coal mines. Some might want to attribute the increased number of coal mine deaths to President Trump's anti-regulatory agenda and more business friendly policies particularly for the coal industry. I don't know that to be the case. As far as I know, there are not any Trump officials micromanaging the…
Tesla held its annual stockholder meeting this month, and co-founder/CEO Elon Musk was asked to speak about worker safety problems at their plants. He briefly mentioned the topic in his prepared remarks, but was probed later about it by a stockholder. The question came from @sunabeepdeep who asked: "What changes are being made to address worker safety?" Public attention on working conditions at Tesla’s manufacturing plant in Fremont, CA was prompted most recently by a May 18 story in The Guardian. Reporter Julia Carrie Wong spoke to current and former employees who described intense…
At Eater, Elizabeth Grossman reports that Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation that would protect undocumented agricultural workers from deportation and provide them and their families with a path to long-term residence and citizenship. The bill proposes that farmworkers who can prove at least 100 days of agricultural work in the last two years could apply for a “blue card” that grants temporary residency and the ability to work. Farmworkers with a blue card and who work for 100 days a year for five years or 150 days a year for three years would then be eligible for a green card…
Former Mayor Gayle McLaughlin remembers the phone calls from that evening. It was August 6, 2012. Constituents were calling McLaughlin at home to describe a huge cloud of black smoke infiltrated their neighborhoods. The cloud of pollution was coming from the Chevron refinery. A corroded pipe at the Chevron refinery failed, causing a massive cloud of hydrocarbon and steam that ignited. Next was the shelter-in-place warning. It covered the mayor's town of Richmond, CA town and neighboring San Pablo. The warning lasted lasted five hours. Four transit line stations were closed. Residents of…
At BuzzFeed, Kate Moore tells the story of the “radium girls,” the hundreds of women during WWI who worked painting watch dials with luminous radium paint — a substance that would eventually poison and kill them even though they were told it was perfectly safe. What followed was years of employers covering up and denying evidence that radium was killing workers, while berating the women for attempting to get help with their mounting medical bills. Eventually, Moore writes, their fight for justice led to one of the first cases in which an employer was held responsible for the health of workers…
Accounting professors have confirmed what we always suspected: companies which are scrambling to meet or just beat Wall Street analysts’ profit projections have worker injury rates that are 12% higher than other employers. The recent research indicates that frantic efforts by “benchmark-beating” employers – increasing employees’ workloads or pressuring them to work faster, at the same time that these employers cut safety spending on activities like maintaining equipment or training employees, to meet the profit projections – are the likely source of increased injuries and illnesses.…
Cell tower worker Kris Runyon, 39, fell to his death on Tuesday, May 2 in Meridian, MS. Local news station WAPT reports the incident occurred at about 7 pm when Runyon was 228 feet off the ground on a cell tower. A co-worker witnessed the incident and the county coroner reported that Runyon was wearing safety equipment designed to prevent a fatal fall. The industry news source WirelessEstimator.com reports that Mr. Runyon was employed by D&K Nationwide Communications. D&K is a subcontractor to MasTec, a business that provides engineering, construction, and maintenance services to…